Balanced Challenge Day 1 – Setting Family Priorities

Hi! I’m so glad you stopped by. I hope you are blessed by what you read here. This post is part of the Balanced challenge with Tricia Goyer. The Balance Challenge is happening now through March 21—and you can join, too! Oh, click on the link to purchase: Balanced: Finding Center as a Work-at-Home Mom by Tricia Goyer.

I am so excited to have the opportunity to participate in this challenge by Tricia Goyer. You see, I have felt unbalanced and not sure just how to do it all. Then I read the first chapter of Tricia’s new book Balanced and began to understand that being “balanced” doesn’t meant that I should/will be able to do it all. Which I already knew, after all, I’m not God. It does mean however that I can set priorities (and throw away the guilt that comes when you try to do too many things) that will allow me to determine what things I do and not do and feel balanced in the midst of it.

The challenge for today is to determine our family priorities.

Tricia provided a good starting point by asking us some thought provoking questions. What do we want to achieve as a family? What will matter 5 years from now? What will bring peace – not stress – to our home?

Over dinner our family discussed these questions to set some family goals. Here’s what we came up with:

To raise our boys to be Godly men.

To raise healthy, educated, responsible young men.

To build our family bond.

Be a family that is helpful and respectful of each other.

Seek God’s direction for our lives (individually and as a family) and follow him.

I didn’t feel the conversation could really stop there. You see I felt there was a lot of room for “interpretation”. Each of these things may look different to each member of our family (as well as to different families). The ways in which I would choose to meet our goal of to raise our boys to be Godly men may look different to my husband. For example, when I asked him what that looked like to him, he said “not cursing”,”not doing things that break the law”, etc. But to me, those things don’t mean that we are necessarily going to raise Godly men. Good people, not necessarily “people with the goal to raise Godly men” can do those things.

Do you understand what I’m saying?

So in order to avoid misinterpretation and miscommunication we discussed what each of these priorities looks like. HOW do we accomplish these goals? In order for us to work together to achieve our goal and eliminate misunderstandings, we need to know how each of us define “Godly” and together determine a definition. After all, our goals need to be the same and as clear as possible in order to have the best possible result. Our family chose to list some action points that we think will help us bring our goals to fruition. It is important for you to understand that this list is not exhaustive. There is just no way I could list every thing we could do to achieve these goals here, but these are good starting points.

To raise our boys to be Godly men by:

Reading the Bible in front of them and with them (I believe it is very important for our kids to see us reading the Bible and to hear us praying for them.)

Attending and being involved with a community of believers i.e., church

Praying together as husband and wife as well as with our boys

To raise healthy, educated, responsible young men b:.

Teaching them HOW to learn

Giving them a Godly home education

Teaching them how to critically think in order to see Truth in everyday life

To build our family bond by:

Having dinner together on nights that the boys are not taking part in Boy Scouts or Fiber Club

Spending quality time together playing games, exercising, vacationing together, etc.

Be a family that is helpful and respectful of each other by:

Serving each other with a good attitude

Being considerate of each others feelings

Listening to one another

Encouraging each other

Being aware that we are each a part of the family unit and have responsibilities in it

Seek God’s direction for our lives (individually and as a family) and follow him.

I hope that you have been challenged and encouraged by this post. Our priorities/goals as individual families is going to vary, but my prayer is that I have given you something to think about.

Please leave me a comment below and let me know what your thoughts are. If you have something to add or something that you want me to think about, I would love to hear from you. I hope to see you tomorrow for our challenge on “Work”. We will be talking about how to make working from home work for you.

Thank you for posting your family’s priorities. I LOVE the way you broke each section down. It really helped me think about my own priorities and how I can write them for my family. I work much better with bullet points than paragraphs because they are easier to find quickly and read quickly.
I am going to start with your framework and modify for my family. Thank you again!!!

I did fairly well with my first few days of the Balanced Challenge and keeping up with the posts. Unfortunately, life intervenes and I don’t keep up as well as I would like. I plan to continue posting my progress as I work through the balanced challenge. Stop by again and let me know what you think.